Modern mobiles phones are overpriced and suffer from trying to be a
jack-of-all-trades, according to the manufacturer of a
new
type of modular handset.
"You buy everything but the sink today," Zack Weisfeld, vice president of
marketing at
Modu
Mobile, told
vnunet.com.
"When you buy a phone you have everything crammed in and you're paying a
pretty hefty price for all these functions and features when they're really not
best-of-breed and are hard to use."
Weisfeld added that users are bound by contracts and expensive devices which
they cannot change as often as they would like.
Dov Moran, chief executive of Modu Mobile, explained that people had turned
to a single handset because they did not want to carry several devices at the
same time.
"When you have one device you cannot get the best-of-breed and you are
actually getting a device which is a combination of very mediocre subsystems,"
he told vnunet.com.
"It is not the best camera and it is not the best GPS and it is quite a lousy
MP4 player and it is too small to have email and not convenient to watch video
and it is too large to feel comfortable in your pocket."
Dov claimed that the idea behind Modu, a tiny mobile phone that slots into
different 'jackets' to provide different functions, is to have a single device
that could turn into whatever dedicated handset users needed it to be.
"We want to have one device, but one device that can be the best camera, with
the best MP4 player and with the ability to do email or browsing, but its main
functionality will be a camera," he said.
"Or it could be an MP4 player with a large display that would allow you to do
wonderful browsing on the internet, but maybe doesn't have the best camera
because it's not the most important thing for you."
Moran said that getting the best of everything in one device was not possible
because of conflicts with size and features.
He claimed that the Modu device solved that problem. "You can really choose
and have different bits at different times of the day," Moran said.
"During the day emails may be very important to you because you are an email
person, or if you are a young student you want to have the best music.
"But maybe when you go to a movie in the evening you really don't intend to
do email or to listen to music so the best thing is to have a very small device
in your pocket to simply allow communication."
Weisfeld also questioned the credentials of fashion-branded handsets.
"LG,
Samsung
and other companies have fashion-branded phones. There's a logo on the phone and
it takes about 18 months to do that, which is not fashion," he said.
"The whole concept with Modu is to get the process with these big fashion
companies where they create collections of Modu jackets that will fit their
winter, summer, autumn collections with fabric, colours and expressions and
really bring it to market in a very different way than it is today."
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